Alejo Carpentier Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Mark I. Millington

SOURCE: "Gender Monologue in Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos," in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 3, No. 2, March, 1996, pp. 346-67.

In the following essay, Millington asserts that "there is no doubt that what is achieved in Los pasos perdidos by the narrator is a masculist discourse of exclusion and manipulation, offset by some irony or counterpointed fragmentally when other voices become briefly audible."

In section XII in chapter 2 of Los pasos perdidos, the narrator reaches an area of the South American jungle which, in his calculation of his movement back through the stages of civilization, he calls "Tierras del Caballo." As always, his immediate reaction is highly wrought description—the construction of a complex semantic web to make sense of the unknown. This description of the "Tierras del Caballo" emphasizes physicality: the vivid sounds, smells and colours associated with horses and blacksmiths are invoked and also an imagined male rider's...
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